At present, large-scale integrated circuit production lines require that the coater and developer in-line with lithograph equipment have high throughput which is higher than that of the lithograph equipment. This high throughput coater&developer in-line with the lithograph equipment mainly have the functions of coating photoresist in the tool after unloading wafers from cassette, then transferring wafers into lithograph equipment to dealing with exposing process via the interface unit, after that, transferring wafer via interface unit hack to coater & developer for developing process, and finally re-loading the wafers in cassette.
The coater & developer mainly completes the main processes including tackifying before coating, coating, soft baking after coating, baking after exposing, developing, and hard baking after developing, so the coater&developer has various processing modules and wafer transfer robots.
The throughput of the coater & developer mainly depends on the throughput of the processing modules, quantity of the processing modules, wafer transfer speed of the robots, wafer transfer path, structures and layout of the processing modules therein, and those factors have certain influences on each other. To design the coater & developer, the above factors and mutual relationships thereof shall be taken into full consideration, and then the developing and design of high cost-performance products can succeed.